Cheating at Solitaire(105)
“‘Hello’ is what I always say when I pick up the phone.
I’m trying to avoid the imminent start of a press conference here, so I ’d appreciate it if you’d talk to me a little. I take it this is about the wedding.”
“No,” Bennis said. “Actually, not, although if you’ve gotten in touch with Janet, I ’d appreciate it. I mean, really, Gregor, hand made chocolates, and all she wants is to sound you out about it. She’s trying to be conscientious here. She is being conscientious here. And they’re very good chocolates. So cooperate.”
“I thought you said this wasn’t about the wedding,” Gregor said.
There was a sigh on the other end of the line, the kind of sigh all women perfected, on the assumption that all men were inherently impossible. “I called a friend of mine,” Bennis said. “I mean, I know you said to check the Internet, and I would have gotten around to it eventually, and I will if you still want me to. But I called a woman I knew at Vassar. At the moment, she’s the editor in chief of Celebrity magazine.”
Gregor thought about that for a moment. “Should I be impressed with that?” he asked.
“Well, Iris isn’t,” Bennis said, “but for your purposes at the moment, she’s perfect. Celebrity magazine is about celebrities, which Iris defines as ‘people who are famous who haven’t actually done anything.’ I thought that was a little harsh, considering the fact that the celebrities you’re interested in are all making a movie, which is doing something, if not something as important as bringing an end to the conflict in Palestine. Is Stewart Gordon going to come to our wedding?”
“If you invite him, he probably will,” Gregor said. “Although I think he’s falling in love, so you’d better let him bring a guest. Does this Iris person know where Steve Becker is and what’s he’s doing?”
“Yes, she does,” Bennis said, “and she knows a lot more than that. Steve Becker is associate producer on a movie tentatively called Nemesis Rising that is, at the moment, filming somewhere in Canada. He started there on December fifth. Don’t go looking in your notes. I have it. The Las Vegas trip was November eleventh. Anyway, it’s anybody’s guess how he suddenly got to be an associate producer when all he was on that movie of yours was a grip, but the general feeling seems to be that Michael Bardman paid him off.”
“All right,” Gregor said. “Even I’ve heard of Michael Bardman. Isn’t he the head of some studio or the other?”
“Of Archer Entertainment, yes, which is a production company, which is not exactly the same thing as a studio. But it’s also Archer Entertainment that’s making your movie, so you see how that could work.”
“Michael Bardman is out here?” Gregor asked.
Bennis was exasperated. “Of course not. Michael Bard-man doesn’t go running around to location sites for minor films, even his own minor films. He’s always got some guy on the production whose main job is to report to him and keep things moving and cool. On your movie, it’s a guy named Carl Frank. His official title is head of public relations for the movie, or something like that. If you haven’t seen him around just yet, there’s this picture of all of them, well not really of him, of Arrow Normand and Steve Becker and Kendra Rhode and all of them when they first got to Vegas on that ridiculous trip—”
“I know the picture,” Gregor said. “They’re all standing in a line with their arms around each other’s shoulders.”
“That’s the one. Carl Frank is just in the background to the left, practically like the devil waiting to score a soul. Or something. Ignore me. I’ve been talking to Tibor. They’re all in that picture. Carl Frank is in the back. Mark Anderman is standing next to Kendra Rhode with his left arm around her neck, practically hanging on her, and Steve Becker is on the other side of her, with his right arm around Kendra Rhode and his left behind Arrow Normand’s back. And that, you see, is the big deal. The picture.”
“The picture is a big deal?” The door to the dressing room had opened and Bram Winder was standing in it, looking thunderous. Gregor waved him away and turned so that he couldn’t see him. “It didn’t look like a big deal,” Gregor told Bennis. “It’s a staged shot, from what I can see. And there’s something wrong with the light.”
“I know,” Bennis said. “The flash glinted off somebody’s jewelry and spoiled the effect. But it doesn’t really matter what the effect is, because that picture is the only one. There are some other pictures, single shots here and there, a few people got with cell phone cameras, but the thing about the Vegas trip is that they managed to go out there without the usual army of photographers. According to Iris, that’s because of two things. First, there weren’t that many photographers hanging around the set on Margaret’s Harbor before the murder. There were a few, you know, but these guys have to make a living, and there wasn’t enough action on Margaret’s Harbor to make it feasible for most of them to hang on full-time. Add to that the fact that Kendra Rhode had adopted some local newspaper reporter as practically her court photographer, and most of the big-time guys stayed in L.A. The other thing has to do with the posses.”